All the rumors are true: I’ve been thinking too much again.
Lately, I’ve been having a hard time stopping myself from thinking critically about everything, burning myself out by constantly analyzing everything everywhere all of the time. I keep forgetting some things don’t need to be contextualized, rationalized, or justified—some things just are.
I spent the past week writing an intro for this piece but never quite landed somewhere I liked. I was so focused on contextualizing, rationalizing, and justifying that I never came out and simply said what I wanted to say.
This week, we’re talking about how to talk to people who differ from you politically. It’s not a piece on how to convince others of your beliefs, nor is it a piece encouraging anyone to engage with violent bigots to build bridges. It’s a piece about how we’re all stuck in this—what’s the word again?—shithole country together so it might be worthwhile to figure out how to actually talk to one another.
I’m joined today by Ellie Light who I fully intend to cyber bully into starting her own Substack or podcast or any form of sharing her brain with the world. She’s compassionate and insightful, and I think we can all learn from her practice of radical self-acceptance—or at least I can learn from it.
Ellie Light likes to think she has interesting takes on politics but actually just listens to a lot of NPR and CBS Sunday Morning and likes the sound of her own voice. She grew up an only grandchild (no siblings or first cousins!) in an interfaith family and is a progressive Jew who spent eight years going to church five days a week at her conservative high school.
She moved away from her hometown and swore she would never move back. So naturally, she moved back to that same hometown 10 years later. To kick off this piece, she would like everybody to know that she does not condone hate speech or human rights violations.
Talking to All of You About Talking to Ellie About Talking to Conservatives
As much as I love research like a real fucking nerd, I was born to yap. I’ve got that yapper in me. Yapper’s remorse? Yeah, I’ve been there—that’s just the price you have to pay for yapping too close to the sun. Anyway, this piece rests less on the back of cited sources and more on what Ellie and I have to say, largely because it is hard to find and extrapolate data that explains our unique interpersonal relationships.
It’s also been hard to settle on the final version of this piece. Over the past month, Ellie and I have continued this conversation far beyond what is contained here: we’ve taken various approaches to putting it all together, deciding what to cover, and figuring out where our heads are from one week to the next.
To set the tone, I wanted to kick the piece off by asking Ellie:
Emily: What are your intentions and goals for this piece?
Ellie: From a big picture perspective, my goal is that we don’t let hate and fear win. This polarization is dehumanizing everyone—almost nobody votes for any politician with their whole chest, and it would serve us all to remember that.
From a more realistic perspective, I would love for people to walk away from this piece with a bit more hope and willingness to talk to each other in more vulnerable ways. We all need each other on a human level (conservatives and progressives and everyone in between).
I’m not saying you need to be besties with your super racist uncle who has always creeped you out or the person who has said horrible things to you—people who suck suck regardless of their politics. I’m advocating against putting anyone in a box purely based on one identity. To quote @gogreensavegreen, “If you’re not seeing the conversations you want to see—start them. Don’t get mad at others for not having them.”
Conservative communities are full of all types of marginalised people. I’d hate to leave them behind in pursuit of some individualistic and unattainable idea of moral purity. In my dream world, we all feel safe to live where we want and people don’t have to keep leaving their family and friends behind to seek safety.
What I don’t want to do today is apologize for or rationalize behavior or beliefs that are harmful to me and the people I love. This is where I think Ellie and I differ, not because I think she has done either such thing but because she has a greater degree of empathy for those who voted for Trump than I do. I am trying to live in the in-between here, and it is an active effort.
But I also don’t want the topic to discourage people from reading this piece. I wanted to approach today’s conversation with an open mind, and I hope you all will do the same. Ellie’s insights are not only pertinent but thought-provoking, which is honestly why we’ve had to work so hard to keep the scope narrowed enough to fit into one piece.
With that said, I wanted to lay down some groundwork by asking:
Emily: How has where and how you grew up shaped your political identity?
Ellie: Whatever room I was in growing up, I was often the youngest or smallest or only whatever, and it left me feeling like an outsider. Being an outsider also makes it easier to be an observer.
When I went from a much more conservative high school (where I was one of the most progressive people) to a much more progressive college (where I realized I was far less progressive than I thought), I had to—and still continuously have to—really investigate everything I was ever taught. My guiding political and life principles basically come down to seeking love, light, and curiosity.
Throughout my life, I have repeated that pattern of going between environments where I’m the most progressive to significantly less progressive. These pendulum swings made me realize that we are all mostly just products of our environment and of peer pressure, even when we spend a lot of time trying to defy it.
There are plenty of people who are progressive because they grew up surrounded by progressives. That was the case for a lot of progressive people I went to college with. They came from the northeast or large cities to Atlanta and spent way more time judging conservatives than trying to understand them.
And even that process I can intellectualize. No matter where we grew up, live now, or have been in-between, we (the universal we) are all just seeking some combination of social acceptance from whomever we deem the ‘in crowd’ of our current and past situations. We are all products of our relationship with peer pressure. Because of that, most of my politics are aimed at the system over the individual.
Emily: What have you learned through maintaining lifelong relationships with conservatives, and have any of those lessons informed your politics at all?
Ellie: There is a broader spectrum of politics that gets organized under the word ‘conservative’ and a big chunk of those politics don’t make people evil.
It's easy to try to approach conservative ideology from a place of moral and/or intellectual superiority, but that approach is often hypocritical and intellectually dishonest. Being progressive doesn’t make me a morally perfect person either.
What I do know is that most people are worried about 80% of the same things and that we all feel pain so to stereotype someone over a single label is to dehumanize them. People are generally messy, complex contradictions. For example, I know a person who owns a company that probably voted for Trump. That person has also helped multiple of their employees get citizenship, continues to fund local scholarships, contributes to other newer businesses’ fundraising, and is generally very civically involved.
By social media standards, that person should be canceled purely based on their vote. But, they are truly IN community. And if I keep going after them about the price of eggs, they would feel alienated and we wouldn’t have actually accomplished anything in terms of developing a deeper understanding of each other and finding common political and personal ground. And there is lots of common ground to be found between that person and myself!
A lot of conservatives are focused on how things immediately impact the people around them (see graph above). They essentially think and act locally and expect the same of others. Anyone who has been to the South or the Midwest knows you are in danger of getting trapped in a 20-minute conversation with a stranger anytime you are in public. This is actually a great lesson on our spheres of influence and where our actions often have the most impact. Because of this, I’ve really shifted my focus to local and state governments. I’m thinking globally, but I’m acting locally.
Throughout our conversations, Ellie kept reminding me that a lot of the problems we have with individuals may sometimes be the result of systems that don’t necessarily care about our best interests. I wanted to give Ellie space to expand on this more here, so I asked:
Emily: How do you see the role of institutions and systems like government, religion, and the media writ large impacting how we learn and process things differently? How do you see that impacting the conservative worldview specifically?
Ellie: The systems we grow up in inform basically everything about how we learn, view, and process the world around us. In much of the South, Midwest, and rural America where conservatism has the strongest hold, loyalty, respect, and trust in your neighbor and local community is highly valued.
But developing and maintaining those values requires social cohesion and social cohesion is often accomplished through the use of shame. It's so prevalent, so deep, and coming from so many different directions (school, religion, parents, peers, media, etc.) that it's hard for people from cities and more progressive places to wrap their heads around—that shame can be telling you exactly how you should think, what to like, what was and wasn’t ok, and how to exist in the world.
On top of that, many people continue to be taught directly and unconsciously that it is shameful to question things as it is seen as disrespecting authority. Can you imagine how overwhelming and anxiety-inducing it could be to try to face questioning or unlearning what you’ve been taught if it's been that ingrained in you?
Add to that the fact that a lot of those places tend to have less funding, less education, and are generally left behind. For example, I went to a very good school and I’m not sure that I was ever explicitly told that critical thinking is basically identifying, understanding, and dissecting whatever lens a source is presenting information through. That is FUNDAMENTAL.
There was a post from Threads that made its rounds across the vaguely Resistance-y Instagram accounts lately that read:
I feel like would be counterproductive in this conversation to say that any one ideological group is “better” than another. Instead, I wanted to return to the moral allocation graph above and build off the notion that liberals or left-leaning voters think globally in their politics. As the heatmap indicates, by doing that, left-leaning voters are factoring consideration for people they don’t know into their ideologies thereby practicing empathy with their beliefs and their ballots.
I wanted to know how, for Ellie, that behavior applied to conservatives so I asked:
Emily: What are your core progressive beliefs and have they made you more empathetic toward the conservatives in your life?
Ellie: A great country is one that is focused on mutual respect, equal opportunity, and equal access to rights.
For me, mutual respect requires that you stay open-minded and genuinely listen to all people who are different than you (including ideologically) while also kindly providing feedback when the recipient is receptive. Equal opportunity is all about leveling the playing field, and it also needs to include mining towns and middle America. Equal access to rights also means that people should be allowed to express their beliefs and thoughts without fear of being shamed as long as they aren’t actively hurting other people.
I’m a big believer in talking it out, even if it emotionally sucks. Any move to shut down or stifle conversation isn’t very productive in my opinion. There is a big sentiment—at least from the conservatives I know—that they feel like they can’t really discuss their beliefs or ideas out loud without getting yelled at.
And before you start to assume that those beliefs are wholly problematic, we aren’t talking about racist or bigoted ideas. We are talking about any political ideas. To me, that’s a problem because an unaired and unchallenged thought is an undeveloped one. It is a messy process where intent and willingness to accept and grow from feedback are critical.
There is a lot to learn from all sides and that requires humility and open-mindedness. No group is a monolith.
Could I wax on a bit here and respond to Ellie with every thought in my head? Sure. But why waste a perfect segue?
[And Then Suddenly “Talk talk” Starts Playing in the Background]
There is a story I used to think about a lot, but the specifics evade me now: at some point in high school amidst some lesson about the Enlightenment, or maybe the Scientific Revolution, someone pondered that they didn’t think such a period of development could happen again today. They argued that we’re more inclined to debate rather than discuss, and both the lack of collaboration and reliance on winning arguments keep us from a modern renaissance.
I fear that student was an oracle and I missed out on asking for key predictions when I had the chance.
But it’s true: the core of Trumpism is rooted in the McCarthyist logic of beating your opponents at whatever cost and that’s something we’ve been grappling with for nearly a decade. Talking about politics, in particular, has become less about understanding one another and more about walking away from interactions feeling like you bested the person you’re talking to.
I’ve experienced this firsthand and I’ve fallen prey to behaving like that, too. I have actively felt superior to those who believed Trump when he said he was going to lower the price of eggs because I know that is not how our economy—or Trump himself—works.
Knowing this is not a left or right issue but a symptom of our current culture and political climate, I wondered how Ellie manages to have conversations rather than Jubliee-style pissing matches. I asked:
Emily: Do you have meaningful political conversations with conservatives in your life? If so, how?
Ellie: I do try and I’m not always successful. Sometimes, one or both of us end up too worked up to really move forward.
Candidly (and she knows I’m writing this), I really struggled the first few weeks after the election, especially because my oldest friend, Harper1, had voted for Trump. Despite expecting Trump to win, I was more emotional about the outcome than I thought I would be. It was tense for a bit and I had to let my emotions air out for more than a week. I kept asking myself, “What is the true goal of my conversations with Harper? Do I want to yell at her or am I genuinely curious and feeling vulnerable?”
I waited to call her until I got to the place where I felt that I could muster enough curiosity to have a conversation. When I eventually called her up, we talked for three hours.
At one point, she told me that this election had given her a sense of hope that she hadn’t felt in a long time. That was hard to hear, and I told her as much: “It's very hard for me to hear that you are feeling so hopeful about something that genuinely is filling me with so much fear.” That was where the conversation really started.
We continue to have many more deep and full conversations than we have in the past. We have both said things to each other that have hurt each other’s feelings, but we have also started continuously returning to the habit of saying to each other, “I don’t want you to feel like there is anything you can’t tell me.” Honestly, that has been important for our relationship (and credit to Harper for starting that trend).
I am trying to continue asking lots of questions like, “Where did you get that idea from? What are you really concerned about?” I verbally tell the other person multiple times that my goal is to better understand their perspective.
I work at expressing most of my disagreement through the lens of personal concern for them or myself. Most conservatives can be very locally-minded so tying in the personal or anecdotal experience of someone you know or they know can be very effective. I often ask how they are seeing the impacts of political decisions playing out in their own lives.
Sometimes, I straight up tell the other person how to strengthen their argument even if I really disagree with they’re saying. I try to gently present evidence about how their underlying assumptions are wrong. Everybody, even myself, is falling for highly biased information, discrediting us all and lowering interpersonal social trust even more. ‘How to not be Wrong’ is a fun and un-mathy explanation of data bias that shows this.
Occasionally, I start the conversation with a disclaimer, like, “Hey, the topic we are talking about is personal or emotional for me, which means we could leave this conversation with you feeling intellectually stimulated or drained and me feeling emotionally charged or drained. We need to establish that ahead of us continuing the conversation.”
Sometimes it's emotional for both sides. Acknowledging the personal and emotional elements sheds light on the humanity involved in the conversation. If done successfully, you will both have a deeper understanding of the other person, even if you ultimately still disagree.
Through talking with Ellie, I realized that the way I approach conservatism—and, by the transitive property, conservatives—is still largely driven by my research from college. By this, I mean to say I think I still view conservatives as subjects to study rather than interact with. I want to learn about them but I don’t often consider whether or not there’s anything I can learn from them…that’s Jordan Klepper’s job.
With that in mind, I wanted to ask Ellie:
Emily: What are some things you've learned about Trump from those who support him? Has learning these influenced the way you see him or the way you see your friends in any notable way?
Ellie: Trump and RFK sold hope and change to a different group of people than Obama did. It’s all marketing. It’s always marketing.
We need to be more understanding that there are people out there who didn’t vote for him because of racism or sexism or bigotry—they voted for American manufacturing jobs, or tightened borders, or the fact that he is a (seemingly) savvy businessman, or because they believe that abortion is murder, or lower taxes on their small business.
The Republican Party is much better at getting people to believe, “This candidate isn’t perfect but they are good enough,” in a genuine fashion that Democrats just haven’t cracked. I don’t like it, but I’m directing my frustration at the two-party system rather than at individuals.
We need to stop with the dichotomous thinking and the moral superiority. If you have friends who work in consulting (like me), finance, insurance, or many of the other industries that probably require some level of moral compromise to “survive” then you need to face the fact that you are being hypocritical when you are overly criticizing conservatives and not being willing to hear them out.
Your care for others is conditional when, for example, your progressive friend’s compromise under capitalism is more righteous than someone else’s vote. We all do morally ambiguous things, act hypocritically, and are generally messy, which all just means that we are all human.
I also think that with time, more people are going to start feeling a bit more scammed. And because that takes a greater deal of humility than I think I could muster, we need to create an environment where people feel they can admit it.
I want to regroup here to share my thoughts, broken down into the three different themes Ellie covered in her response.
For starters: while this piece is my effort to be more tolerant of other perspectives, I’m also still, at my core, petty. While Ellie argues that people who voted for Trump might not see voting for American jobs, border control, an abortion ban, or lower taxes from “a” “billionaire” “businessman” as bigoted, I personally still do. Bearing in mind that, as Ellie said, many Americans think locally when they vote, it’s hard for me to not see notes of xenophobic hatred in “stricter border control” comments that dehumanize the individual people at the border or the idea that your religious belief is the determining factor of my access to medical care.
These beliefs can be the result of a lack of understanding or exposure, yes. But if I enter a conversation with someone who cites these beliefs as reasons for supporting Trump in the Year of Cher 2025 and throughout the conversation can’t see the roots of these arguments in bigoted ideologies, marketing, and history, I am going to have a hard time moving forward. More to it, I think bigotry can be passive when it is the result of thinking about others so little.
Perhaps that’s just me thinking too globally again—thinking about who gets hurt in the valiant fight for $3.99 eggs again—but it still is a sticking point I can’t work around. At least, not right now.
Mind you, I have to regularly remind myself that only 63.8% of eligible Americans voted in last year’s election, meaning over a third of the American voting population did not vote for either candidate for whatever reason. That also feels weird to me—how we’re all in this same boat together, all having entirely different experiences, yet all impacting each other with our individual choices.
But (maybe paradoxically depending on how you interpret my above commentary) I whole-heartedly agree with Ellie’s point about moral superiority—and not because I work in a morally ambiguous industry. The most popular E4P piece ever published is and has remained Sandra Etuk’s argument that it is a privilege to opt out of capitalism to live in total alignment with your values. I think its lasting relevance is a result of its relatability—even dream jobs come with some degree of compromise unless your dream job is to sublimate your individualism in whatever way capitalism requires of you each and every day…I guess.
It also, in part, goes back to Ellie’s comments about institutions and fighting against systems rather than people, which I think is a key component of this conversation. If we focus on Ellie’s logic and readjust some of our moral equivalences, I think this can be a starting point for a lot of conversations that (I’ll be brave and say it!!!!) the Emory alumni voting bloc and others like it can connect with.
I think we have to start somewhere if we are to get to Ellie’s last point and be a place where people can feel safe defecting if and when they realize they were sold snake oil by a man in an ill-fitted suit. Maybe my above comments don’t make me the safest place yet, or maybe that’s a fair entry fee for my support—I don’t think this all needs to be worked out today.
But I admittedly don’t have conservatives in my inner circle. I don’t have the foundational fondness for any one such person the way Ellie does for her friends, the people she’s known all her life. I was curious, with all of this said, to know:
Emily: How do you reconcile the love you have for your friends with the fact that they often vote against many of the things you believe in?
Ellie: That’s actually the easiest question for me to answer. Why would I focus on one bi-annual action (a person’s vote) over the sum of their daily actions? Plus, a vote for Democrats is also a vote against many things I believe in as well.
To me, political differences—as defined as a person’s vote and their ideas about public policy and not as the idea that everything is political—do not equal character flaws. Yes, Harper voted for Trump but she also works at a public hospital providing free and severely discounted care to every disenfranchised group you can imagine: the undocumented, the previously and currently convicted, the trafficked, the houseless, the abused, the severely disabled, the dying…a lot of the dying…all of it.
She does more towards the values I believe in in a single day than I do in a month.
I keep thinking about the conversation I had with someone here back in 2023 about policing in this country. While the edited interview didn’t fully capture it, the overall sentiment was that my guest and I agreed that the institution of policing needed to change but her preconceived notions—learned by growing up in a police family—stopped her from supporting anything that would tangibly alter things.
It’s the same sense I get from Ellie’s discussion of Harper: here is someone who is acting in ways we would expect of someone with progressive political beliefs but her learned beliefs still drive her worldview and vote.
I don’t know Harper at all and I no longer know the person from the policing interview, but I think there’s something to be said here about clinging to the labels that bring us comfort. It feels safe to associate with our family or identify as we always have, even when our current lives, beliefs, and actions have strayed from what they used to be. All change is scary but as my former guest, Harper, Ellie, and I each exemplify, we change a little with every new conversation.
I think reminding myself of this when I interact with people and ideas that I don’t immediately agree with—that I am altering something in my brain by talking to them just as they are with me—can only help to reduce any shame I might elicit in others.
Recently, I started wondering out loud to someone about how neither the Republican nor Democratic Party is doing a great job of representing the voters affiliated with them, so would really be wrong to introduce a multi-party system and help more Americans feel seen by their representatives?
The response? “I’ve actually never thought about that.”
There’s been a lot of talk about why Americans are so divided politically but I don’t know if there is equal breath being given to solutions for unity—in these trying times, why not get a little crazy with it and see if something (anything!!!!) works? Maybe England did have it right and we fumbled the bag in 1776! Maybe we should have waited for the king hype to kind of cool down and gone with a constitutional monarchy featuring a plurality electoral structure!!
All this to say, I was interested in whether or not Ellie has gleaned any insights into what we could do to lessen some of this divide past understanding where one another is coming from. I asked:
Emily: Based on your experience, do you see any solution to the extreme partisan divide or is this only doomed to get worse?
Ellie: There are many solutions but we are not currently on course to turn it around. We need to treat our civic engagement like it's our job because it is. It starts with truly working on emotional regulation and less reactivity, and doing more than just voting and getting mad at the current state of the world.
We need to focus on community and the collective and that means that you are going out of your way for people whose values are wildly different than yours in hopes of finding your shared humanity. Divisiveness breeds more divisiveness on both sides and most of us are perpetuating the issue. We are shooting from the hip at each other, and that’s a surefire way for everyone to end up wounded.
Generally speaking, to blanket get rid of everyone in your life because of one choice they’ve made (like vote for Trump) is dehumanizing, too. Again, I’m not saying that you should be besties with your weird racist uncle. I’m saying that if you are like me and are truly concerned about the expansion of governmental power into authoritarianism, then alienating people based on one choice is not how we effectively address the situation.
A big tool of this administration is confusion, emotion, and othering. Rejecting conservatives is playing into that tool. Othering people leaves space for authoritarian power to grow. That gap is where we lose our collective power. We need to welcome nuance and togetherness. We need to leave people room to grow and provide them the opportunity to rise to the occasion. We need to find truly healthy boundaries and common ground.
Emily: What is your advice for anyone who is not in a position to cut conservatives out of their lives on how to continue to live and communicate with minimal tension?
Ellie: First of all, you should never cut someone out of your life purely because they are conservative. Cut people out of your life because they are actively hurting you or the people you care about, not just because some of their views make you uncomfortable.
The key question I ask myself is, ‘Do I trust this person to do the right thing when faced with a character-defining moment?’ I use the wedding test. I have friends from all walks of life and they will all be thrown together at the theoretical wedding or holiday gathering. If this person (the conservative) can spend an entire drunken weekend with all these people and can be trusted to not do or say anything that would hurt anybody else at the wedding, then they pass the sniff test.
From there, it's important to address the discomfort in one of three ways:
talk about it,
accept that person and the discomfort, or
both.
The issue is most people (myself included sometimes) think they are trying to understand conservatives when we talk to them, but deep down we are trying to shame the other person for their opinion. Shame is a useful tool but it isn’t conducive to changing ideology.
Mirroring or repeating what the person said to you back to them is a great way to deepen both of your understanding and challenge theirs. Expressing how something that is said or is happening in the world makes you feel opens up the conversation with vulnerability and it acts to humanize the conversation and broader situation.
At one point in our conversation, Ellie asked me if I had ever been shamed or taught it was bad to think for myself. The more I’ve sat with it, the more I’ve realized I’ve always been more than encouraged—required, I would even say—to form my own interpretations and opinions. If we ever wanted to watch an adaptation of a book we also wanted to read, my family had a rule that we had to read the book first. The argument was that we had to build the world in our minds before we watched someone else’s interpretation.
I say this because think this is where I can start conversations with people who differ from me—by simply asking, “But what do you think?”
Look, I was worried about this piece coming across as if the onus was on more left-leaning people to just treat conservatives with kindness. Maybe it’s just me but I feel like the rhetoric of “when they go low, we go high” has somehow been translated to mean that we’re expected to learn how to keep the peace and love thy neighbor while our neighbor rants about trans people in bathrooms online.
But I think the key part of Ellie’s last answer and the idea of encouraging people with all ideologies to think for themselves is that these exchanges have to be equal in order to work. You have to mirror each other’s vulnerability to figure out what one another genuinely believes and work through the ideas that we might be carrying without questioning.
Otherwise, what’s the point? No one wants to be told they’re wrong but if you open yourself up to it, you can learn new information that can shift how or what or why you believe something. Or, if nothing else, you just learn something new. I’m not saying any of this is easy or even necessary in all cases. If I’m being fully honest with you, I’m not even sure what I’m trying to argue at the end here. There’s no call to action or resounding conclusion—I am just trying to get some hope where I can find it.
Which is I wanted to end today’s piece on a hopeful note, or one that is at the very least forward-looking. I asked Ellie:
Emily: From the outside looking in, you are someone with a great capacity for love, empathy, and hope. What would you say to anyone who wants to be more like that?
Ellie: To quote Brady Goodman-Williams from another one of your newsletters, “No disrespect to my guy Maslow, but personally I’d put community building lower down on the pyramid with food, water, and shelter. The way I see it: if we don’t have community, we have nothing to live for.”
I’d take it one step further: without community, we also don’t have anything we are willing to die for.
I live in a city I borderline hate so that I can hug people I really love every day. Some days it feels easier for me to change the things I don’t like about my city and state2 than it is to recreate the emotional fulfillment and security of being in community with people I’ve known my whole life and many people I have picked up along the way. Make the sacrifices necessary to live where your community is.
If that isn’t an option for you, then here are some other tangible (re: individualistic and community approach) recommendations:
Listen to David Foster Wallace’s graduation speech, “This is Water,” read Tiny Beautiful Things by Cheryl Strayed, and then repeat that 20 more times over the next few years.
Inconvenience yourself for someone else at least once a day. Make it a stranger. (I once stopped on the street at 11 pm at night the same week I was moving countries to help someone else move their moving boxes through a big intersection).
Go on a couple of one-lap walks around your block without your phone for more days than you think you can muster.
Try to make or fix something with your hands once a week.
Make “You today. Me Tomorrow,” your mantra. Tell yourself that every day.
Help your parents clean out their [insert that room of abandoned things].
Practice stopping yourself mid-panic and rewire your brain towards solutions and action. Do it all with a buddy or five!
Stop focusing on forgiving yourself; you likely haven’t done much that truly requires forgiveness. Focus on accepting yourself. Face how people are different and seek how you are the same (especially when you are really struggling with the differences).
This process will show you the things that scare you the most about yourself and the things you love the most about humanity.
I remind myself every day that life and engaging in the world around us is just like Sisyphus pushing that rock up that hill. We need to keep pushing in hopes that the rock is a little higher for the next generation. We also need to accept that sometimes we get stuck with the phase where the rock falls back down the hill a bit. It doesn’t mean we get to stop pushing.
Invite some friends over to help you push. Make it a dreaded group project!
And when that doesn’t work, I remind myself that bureaucracy (and life!) does a spectacular job at taking too long, being too complex, and generally moving too slowly or quickly for most anyone’s liking.
I’m starting to think the path forward does truly exist—the path out from under Trumpism and the tendrils of hatred that spiral off of it—though it’s a lot messier than any of us could have predicted. Moving forward together is going to be uncomfortable and scary and hard, especially for cold-hearted trolls like me.
But today’s only Monday and this piece is just a start.
Thank you so much to Ellie for talking with me for so long about this specific topic as well as about 35,233 others. Talking with you reminds me of why I started E4P and the great gift it is to connect with people I used to admire from afar now that I have the confidence and wherewithal to tell you how cool I think you are.
Not to be totally desperate, but I’ve made it as easy as possible for you to subscribe so you kind of don’t have an excuse now.
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